ITV has an episode on the NHS right now asking if the NHS is no longer caring for its patients?

Do people think that the NHS is in crisis?

From a personal perspective, and those views not necessarily those of the NHS, the NHS nearly killed my mother, father, sister and fiancee. My fiancee also got the Brucie Bonus of being given MRSA while fighting for her life with sepsis.

> (In reply to Offwidth)
>
> ITV has an episode on the NHS right now asking if the NHS is no longer caring for its patients?
>
> Do people think that the NHS is in crisis?

> How can the kindness and compassion be brought back into the NHS?
>

None of these thing are new are they.

Probably culling the self serving, big timing knackers at the top would help.

The constant 'crisis' reported in the press translates into under funding, under training, and generations of political moral cowardice. Not really going to engender kindness and compassion in those circumstances are we.

Seems rather a silly question, if you don't mind me saying. The NHS is staffed by a huge number of kind and compassionate people. They try their best, under difficult circumstances, to make sick people well; pretty much the definition of compassion, wouldn't you say? I'm sorry that you've had some bad experiences but you shouldn't take the extreme examples that are being trotted out in the media as being representative of the standards of care that most people receive.
A fairer question might be: how can more kindness and compassion be brought back into the NHS?

Some pretty easy changes would help ... 1) make kindness and compassion a priority within the budgets with equal weight to any targets. 2) change the culture with respect to whistle blowers. The view 30 years ago was critisise the consultants and you would never get a job in the NHS again. These days it's more critisise the management structure or the consultants and your job prospects are damaged...both have to change... dealing with fair critisism is good governance. 3) Stop forcing things top down... the more rigid control from above the worse things seem to get... mid staffs came from top-down control on the wrong things... the centralised NHS computer fiasco is one of the biggest wastes of public money ever ..that killed even more people (those who would have been treated better or in time if there was more money).

Not sure what you want here Pat, more money and less targets, less money and more targets, less targets and less money? To me who works in it, it's a anachronism and a behemoth. But nothing happens unless the DOH rubber stamp it.

Waits patiently for a decade for those at the back to catch up. And all the big timers can slap each other on the back and tell us what a great service it is. Best in the world apparently.

In reply to The Lemming: Do you want a simple, serious answer? Well, it's this:

Every fecker - starting at the bottom - starts taking responsibility for their own actions. From the cleaners who sneak off for a crafty fag because they can get awya with it - to the porters who finish their cup of tea before wheeling the sick kid to the X-Ray - to the nurses who finish their anecdotes about the night before before answering the buzzer - to the junior doctor who thinks this doesn't seem quite right, but it's not his problem - to the consultant who thinks, well, I'm a clinician, management is for the unspeakables - to the managers, who have no idea why they earn so much, but continue to play the game and continue to earn stupid money anyway - to the politicans who, I doubt, have read a single, respected, peer-reviewed article in their entire sodding lives. Every one.

To summarise - when anyone in the NHS points the finger, they should remember two fingers are pointing back at themselves.

> (In reply to The Lemming)
>
> [...]
>
> Seems rather a silly question, if you don't mind me saying. The NHS is staffed by a huge number of kind and compassionate people. They try their best, under difficult circumstances, to make sick people well; pretty much the definition of compassion, wouldn't you say?

Yes and no. The Lemming is a paramedic I believe, and my partner is a Staff Nurse with ermm, lets just say a lot of years experience in the NHS. Her take is there are indeed a lot of the staff you've described above. However she's convinced there are probably as many lazy, useless, workshy and frankly dangerous numpties stalking the wards, both nurses and doctors. Both my mum and Mrs Ridge's mum suffered what amounted to abuse prior to death by the NHS.

When I was working in the railway industry I was the chairman of the Trades union committee. We ran a series of raffles throughout the year, and gave to a variety of local and national charities around Christmas time. One year I had a desperate call from a nursing sister on one of the long stay wards dealing with patients suffering from dementia, asking if we could help with some Christmas decorations. We hastily called a meeting, and agreed to add them to our list of worthy causes. Just before Christmas I received an invitation to a party on the ward, which I thought would give me a chance to meet the patients, and see the small difference we had made to their stay in hospital.
Christmas afternoon, the wife and I arrived to find all the patients had been shipped to another ward, and the party was full of the 'great and the good' of the hospital trust...we left!

I didn't realise that you worked for the NHS when I posted. I was about to apologise until I realise that this fact makes your question even more fatuous. I will apologise for implying that you've jumped on a populist, media bandwagon when you were referring to personal experiences and those of your family. Sorry.

In reply to Offwidth:
Mrs Bambi is a long term NHS employee who has been told after doing her job for 15 years that she needs a degree, so "we"(!) are currently doing a degree which involves a lot of research and access to scientific databases which I am finding very interesting.
It seems to me that a large part of the change in the NHS can be put down to 2 things. Firstly management is a constant problem, I don't have any answers but changing the management system every x years so that new people are in charge and have to reinvent the wheel is no way to run anything. Part of the reason this happens is the 'blame culture' that is becoming so prevalent in all areas which is point 2. People need to be responsible for their mistakes and as an organisation the NHS needs to take responsibility for it's corporate failings but the amount currently being spent on insurance and liability claims is high. This leads to a lot of CYA manoeuvres (cover your arse). In this way more and more caring work is being dictated by protocols and procedures, again not in itself a bad thing as these are all research based on safety and all actions need to be recorded in fear of poor outcomes and possible litigation. All this means that the carer is far more likely to be looking at a piece of paper or a computer screen than the patient which can often lead to poorer care.
I've just been through a kidney donor operation and I was in general very impressed with the quality of the service and the attitude of the staff, there are always things you could complain about and sometimes things you should complain about but my impression is usually one of overmanaged and underfunded frontline staff attempting to do a good job.

In reply to mbambi: Yeah I recognise that. The main CYA uses relate to known understaffed or under resourced areas... very mid staffs and very cynical.

I still think there is much good in the NHS though. Yet nothing will improve much if a lot of the top is rotten and I strongly suspect that is the case. I think this management malaise spreads through much of the UK, public and private, the larger and larger amounts of money these people get paid makes them more and more godlike so it could never be there fault if things go wrong and they never lose out whatever; when it should be the exact opposite (pay is high because so is the risk of consequence of mistakes). I don't think its eveyone (I've been lucky enough to know some very impressive folk in very senior management positions in my time alonside the odious toads) but it does seem to be large and growing.

That's very unlucky, to have four prople close to you targeted like that? What was it, some sort of hit squad who visited their homes and botched an assasination? Or does the chain of causation lead back to some sort of illness that took them to hospital which the NHS, for whatever reason, failed to deal with effectively?